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“That’s obvious. I didn’t walk away from my son. I protected him.”

“Fuck you,” I growled. “My decision was mine. Sal understood it. He accepted it.”

“You don’t get to say his name,” she hissed. “You didn’t know him. You were just some tramp he got pregnant and then walked away.”

“I loved him! And he loved me!” I hissed.

It still hurt. Even apart, we never stopped loving each other.

“Why do you think he didn’t tell any of you about Henry until he was two? Or that we were married?”

There was a certain amount of satisfaction in the subtle widening of her eyes. My confession had come as a shock.

“It wasn’t just my family we hid from. Sal hid us both from you too! Maybe ask yourself why he didn’t want you in his son’s life.”

I stood and took a step away before I stopped. Illyria glared at me. But she held her tongue, and I knew it was killing her.

“Sal talked about you. About your relationship. You were close, and he still didn’t tell you about Henry until I gave him permission. He asked me if he could tell you all about our son. I said yes because I wanted Henry to have a family. Aunts and uncles who would love him, protect him. Something I couldn’t give him.”

I looked back at Henry. He had no idea who I was, or that I was even there. Watching him, loving him.

“I wanted to see him one last time. I am leaving New York. I won’t be back. You may have had the power to protect your son, Illyria. I didn’t. But I knew Sal would. He could have told you about me. Who I was. Who my family was. But even in his death, he kept me and Henry safe. I was the one who suggested he make you Henry’s legal guardian in the event something happened to him. That was how I protected my son. Maybe ask yourself how Sal would react to the way you just spoke to his wife and the mother of his child.”

With those parting words, I walked away from Illyria Valentinetti and Maxim Fedorov.

And my son.

CHAPTER SIX

April 2025, Boston

My grandfather’s house had the careful quiet of a place preserved for a man who had been dead more than twenty years. His books still filled the shelves. His furniture remained exactly where he had left it, and the old décor made every room feel less lived in than maintained.

Uncle Sal had insisted Mom and I live there when we returned to Boston. Nearly four months later, I still moved through it like a guest afraid of leaving fingerprints. Mom had begun boxing up pieces of her father’s life, determined to make the house her own, but living beneath the same roof and having a life of my own were not the same thing.

They were not the same thing at all.

This was not refuge. It was a tomb dressed as a family home, a place where Mom and I had been sent while my son grew up two hundred miles away without knowing I existed. The distance was not temporary.

It wasn’t negotiable. It was permanent—a locked door with no key, a severance so complete it felt like amputation.

My body understood what my mind kept trying to soften. Every morning, I woke with my chest already tight and my lungs already fighting for air, as though grief had learned to arrive before consciousness.

The knowledge settled into my bones like sickness: I would never watch Henry play again. I would never see him race Little Max across a playground, comfort Illyria after a fall, or grow into the man Salvatore had dreamed he would become.

I had been exiled from my son’s life. Forever.

The word tasted like ash, like the end of something that should have been allowed to continue. Like a mother being erased while her heart was still beating.

During the day, I performed the obligations of survival with enough discipline to discourage questions. I opened the curtains, showered, answered Mom when she asked whether I had eaten, and walked to the market for food I rarely wanted.

Each task felt rehearsed by a woman who had studied ordinary life without learning how to inhabit it. Every breath was a negotiation with grief—an agreement to keep moving even though movement had lost meaning, to keep living even though living felt like a punishment I had not earned.

Boston had once been where I belonged, but New York still held the park bench where I could see Henry every Saturday. Leaving it severed the last thread connecting me to the life I had surrendered, and the violence of that severance hollowed me out.

Here, there was no playground where I could pretend to read and no distant laughter I could turn into my son’s if I hoped hard enough.

Here, there was only absence—vast, unforgiving, absolute.